Junk Science

I decided to post a comment by an anonymous reader, along with my response. Here goes:

Anonymous said...
I am surprised that a stone mason, one who works with ancient materials, would have such a backward attitude. I remember when the well driller, who drilled our well told me to look at the rock chips coming up out of the hole he was drilling. I asked what I was lookng at and he said there is the proof that the earth is more than 4000 years old. I couldn't agree more. I understand, however, that you must cling to your beliefs or else your life would fall apart. That would be unlike the rock you work with, which only depends on itself and has no foolish expectations.

Here's my response: (I could go on for days, but I don't have the time.)
If you think I don't know anything about rock, try these links on for size:
Get A Half-Life
Articles And Links
"It is interesting that you choose to post anonymously. In answer to your comment, first of all, the Bible doesn't say the earth is 4000 years old. Adam was made of the dust of the Earth more than 6000 years ago, and the material God used to fashion the "creation" described in Genesis was already in existence... created "in the beginning", before Lucifer's fall. If you were to study the geologic phenomena of the Mount St. Helens eruption, you would realize that most of what you were taught in school about geology is fiction. Huge valleys and canyons are carved in a matter of hours, not millenia, by mud flows in the aftermath of large-scale volcanic eruptions and floods... like Noah's flood. Coal beds form not in peat bogs, but in lake and sea beds from the bark that sinks from floating logs... which had been forests before the catastrophe. The ancient Romans used volcanic ash and sand to make "stone"... which is exactly what happened about 4500 years ago on a global scale, in the aftermath of the Flood. That, my friend, is real science, not the fairy tales they teach in the government schools.
Furthermore, there was a university study done on the segregation of aggregates by moving water and air. The results showed that the assumptions used by geologists in "determining" the ages of rock strata are completely erroneous. The layers were laid down concurrently in a progression away from the source of the flow... not over a period of millenia. This explains many geologic phenomena, such as for instance the trees found buried upright in rock layers whose genesis supposedly spanned millions of years. There are a lot of them in Spirit Lake right now, in the aftermath of Mount St. Helens. When floating logs sink, they often "float" below the surface with their root-end downward, and are then buried in volcanic ash and mud. These are the same sedimentary rock layers that geologists claim took millions of years to be laid down.
http://www.atsnn.com/story/107614.html
Quoting:"The story of flash-frozen mammoths with food still in their teeth is well documented by Hancock and (if I'm remembering right) White. When I get home this evening I will look this up in their books and give their references to documents written by the Russian explorers who found these and more."
For more information, try this:

The Boneyards

"I remember those stories from when I was a kid.
Buttercups, the mammoths had mouthfulls of buttercups.
And the meat had been frozen SO fast, that some of the discoverers were brave enough, to cook, and eat a few portions.."

I'm still looking for my original (unimpeachable) sources, but here's some material you might find interesting in the interim. I prefer to use primary, not secondary information.
The material on polar shift theory, in my opinion, only describes what happened in the wake of the root cause of the Flood, best described in the book by the astrophysicist. (An asteroid-like visitor from space brought (cold!) water that (1.) produced six inches of rainfall per minute for 40 days and (2.) knocked the earth off its axis by it's gravitational pull in a near-collision.)
The wooly mammoths lived in regions which are very cold now, but were not so cold before the Flood, as the earth was more temperate due to its water canopy. The plant species growing there were in what we now know as an arctic region, but it was not at that time an arctic climate. Don't miss the importance of the point on how rapidly and unexpectedly they were frozen... in a matter of minutes, without warning. The temperature has been estimated to have been -150 degrees Fahrenheit. This information predates the movie "The Day After Tomorrow by about 100 years. Evolutionists have a vested interest in ridiculing and stonewalling this information. What I'm saying is, there's plenty of information out there to prove the Bible is true and the evolutionists are liars. They try awfully hard to skew the data, and if you look into their eyes, you'll know you're dealing with crooked used-car salesmen. I doubt you'll ever hear an evolutionist give an honest, fair and balanced presentation of the case for evolution. If you believe evolution is "fact", you've been "educated" beyond your intelligence.
Saying that the wooly mammoths were partly decomposed is nothing but obfuscation and dissimulation. Try putting any animal in the freezer and see what its guts smell like in about 4500 years. Cold enough to kill is not necessarily cold enough to flash freeze a large animal to its core and preserve it for 4500 years. For most of that time, it probably wasn't as cold as your household freezer. The facts are that they were grazing on buttercups when a storm hit that was so ferocious they froze to death in less than 10 minutes standing upright with their legs frozen in ice and the buttercups still in their mouths. A violent force beyond human comprehension tore their bodies apart and tossed them in heaps. Some were frozen in a standing position and their legs were then sheared off by the force of the storm. That synchronizes perfectly with the information about the "asteroid" and polar shifts.
I've received some flak to the effect that I must be stupid or something. I don't consider myself to be the sharpest tack in the box, but God has blessed me with a reasonable level of intelligence. I've had a fractured skull, three serious concussions, brain damage from a fever of 106.5 degrees, brain damage from over-consumption of MSG, and mild heat stroke. I'm 55 years old, and not as sharp as I used to be, but I took an IQ test a few weeks ago and scored 132. I wonder how well some of my critics would do.
The "ice age", such as it was, lasted a very short time and occurred as a result of the Great Deluge (Noah's Flood). There's a book on the subject written by an astrophysicist.
Neither my beliefs nor my life are in any danger of "falling apart". Both are founded upon a Rock, and that Rock is Christ, who made the worlds and all that is in them. Chips of old rock coming up from a drilling operation can't prove anything, as this earth is made of "recycled materials".
Whatever happens to this old world, I know where I'll spend eternity. What about you? Will you, like the rock of which you speak, "depend only on yourself"? And if my "foolish expectations" are wrong, what have I lost? If yours are wrong, you will have lost everything. That was "Pascal's Wager". Are you willing to wager your eternal soul? Salvation is not in any particular church, but in Christ alone. I'm saved not because I'm a Baptist, or even a particularly good person, but because I've put my faith and trust in Christ. The circumstances of this life may blow up in my face, but my eternal destiny is secure.

Here are two sites that may be of interest, also: Articles And Links I found the Mount St. Helens information to be EXCELLENT!

Science Falsely So-called

As any real Bible believer knows, the liberal evolutionists are a pack of self-conceited air-headed idiots. No surprise, for the Bible declares, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Scientific journals have been filled for decades with the scribblings of these God-defying reprobates. But their "pillars of wisdom" are crumbling fast... although they are scrambling to deny it. Following is an exerpt I found interesting.
You'd never know it from official news releases, but the Big Bang is broken and can't be fixed. A concession speech may be unlikely in 2005, but the progressive decline of one of the twentieth century's most popular theories now seems inescapable. The Big Bang has lost its theoretical foundation, which was the Doppler interpretation of redshift (linking redshift to the stretching of light wavelengths as objects move away from us). It is now known that, while almost all observed galaxies are redshifted, the Doppler interpretation of this shift does not provide a reliable measure of velocity or (indirectly) of distance. Quasars and galaxies of different redshift stand in physical proximity to each other and are observed to be connected by filaments of matter. Quasars, whose high redshift would place them at the outer edges of the visible universe, are in fact physically and energetically linked to nearby low-redshift active galaxies.

The Big Bang was dismantled by direct observation-including a highly redshifted quasar in front of a nearby galaxy! In the rise and fall of the Big Bang hypothesis no name looms with greater distinction than that of Halton Arp, the leading authority on peculiar galaxies. Over decades, Arp amassed meticulous observations challenging the standard use of redshift to prove an expanding universe. But astronomers ignored or dismissed Arp's work, insisting that his conclusions were either erroneous or impossible. Arp lost his teaching position. Then he lost his telescope time and had to move to Germany to carry on his work at the Max Planck Institute.

For established science the greatest embarrassment could come from public realization that, for decades, astronomers suppressed the warning signs. The critical challenge was raised years ago, as early as the 1960's, when Arp began publishing his findings. To his credit, Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan acknowledged the problem when he was writing Cosmos (published in 1980). But in the following years the politically influential looked the other way, and the word quietly went out to science editors at major newspaper and news magazines that Arp had been fully answered and no more time was needed on the question.

Here is an interesting historical fact. For many years it has been known that the map of the universe acquires a bizarre appearance when you let redshift determine distances. Suddenly galactic clusters stretch out in radial lines absurdly pointing at the earth. The effect is called "the fingers of God," and the earth-directed "fingers" span billions of light-years.
While big bang theorists have cobbled together "explanations" for small-scale examples of the effect, the picture as a whole can only be illusory. The galaxies are not, in fact, stretched out on radial lines from the earth in the way suggested by the "map", but the invalid Doppler interpretation of redshift does create that ludicrous picture. Rationalizations of this effect have been a disservice to science. Theorists should have stopped to notice the obvious.

The failure of the Big Bang hypothesis could be the tipping point in the collapse of modern cosmology, with reverberations affecting all of the theoretical sciences. No domain of scientific inquiry stands in isolation. It is now known that intense electric discharge (such as coronal mass ejections from the Sun) can generate a redshift having no connection to relative velocities. But cosmologists developed their ideas about redshift and the Big Bang under the assumption of an electrically inert universe. Their theoretical starting point invariably shaped their thinking about the birth of galaxies. And these ideas, in turn, conditioned scientific reasoning as to how a galaxy's constituent stars came into existence. Concepts of star formation further constrained scientific reasoning about planetary origins and the evolution of life. From the core of intertwined assumptions, the chains of logic reached out to inspire-but also to shackle-human exploration.

In this environment, cosmologists and astronomers were free to present the expanding universe and the orthodox age and size of the universe as facts. Alongside these "facts" have come a host of mathematical fictions: from dark matter and dark energy to the ever popular "black hole". Though much of today's exercises in esoteric mathematics came after publication of Sagan's Cosmos, America's favorite astronomer in the 1980's had registered a timely warning: "If Arp is right, the exotic mechanisms proposed to explain the energy source of the distant quasars--supernova chain reactions, super-massive black holes and the like--would be unnecessary. Quasars need not then be very distant".

Over the past quarter century the pure mathematicians, with little or no interest in experimental science and only a passing regard for direct observation, have indulged in a carnival of speculation. But it is mind altering to realize that almost nothing revealed by our more powerful telescopes was anticipated by these theorists. We now observe a superabundance of fine filaments across vast reaches of space. In the electrically neutral cosmos claimed by gravity-based cosmology, these filaments find no credible cause. But in plasma experiments with electric discharge, they are predictable.

Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven, the father of plasma physics, showed that cosmologists are mistaken when they imagine that magnetic fields can be "frozen in" to a plasma. Electric currents are required to sustain cosmic magnetic fields. And now, everywhere we look we see magnetic fields at work: electricity is flowing across immense distances in space. At both the stellar and galactic scales, these currents interact with the magnetic fields they induce to create complex structure-strings of galaxies, galactic and stellar jets, and beautiful bipolar stellar nebulas-all with features never envisioned by gravitational theorists, yet corresponding in stunning detail to plasma discharge formations in the laboratory.

Will the year 2005 see a new beginning for cosmology? When you consider the sheer momentum of earlier theory, together with the potential costs in terms of reputations, public funding, and threatened jobs, it would be foolish to expect the "tipping point" to mean a wholesale abandonment of the Big Bang in one year. Discredited theories rarely meet either an instantaneous or a quiet death. But we can confidently predict a year of rapidly growing controversy, on an issue whose final outcome is indeed certain.

Don't expect this information to turn the Christ-rejecting academic world on its ear. A prudent observer will keep in mind that true wisdom and knowledge is "hid in Christ". Without Christ, the lost may (even willfully!) cling to their lies until they end up in the Lake of Fire. Academic blindness and willful ignorance have their roots in spiritual blindness. The only cure is salvation through faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. The "wise" men of this world may be too proud to "stoop" to such simple faith. The wisdom of God is foolishness to them.

Perspectives

I've been having a lot of fun with my point-and-shoot camera. However, I still want a Nikon D70. Too many repair bills and unexpected expenses, though. It'll have to wait. Having two kids in college doesn't help either. Anyhoo... enjoy the pictures. Oh... if you're new to photo blogging... just click on a picture and it'll load a BIG picture in a new window.
There's so much to marvel at in the world. "Making photographs" is just a way of disciplining yourself to focus on the beauty and endless variety of God's Creation. Sometimes a picture is a good way to look at something from a different perspective. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him all creatures here below...